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| Home - Industry Article - Mar 06 Issue |
SaaS Not a "One Size Fits All" Paradigm
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Significant Challenges
I don't foresee any significant new challenges. You know, sometimes the pace of our business makes it feel like we're in the middle of changing the tires while the car is rolling on a day-in, day-out basis. So I see those usual challenges going forward, but nothing out of the ordinary.
I think in the area of marketing – leveraging the Internet will continue to come into favor. For the first time, after the whole dot-com bust four or five years ago, we'll see a new synergy coming from online marketing channels being integrated with the rest of the marketing organization.
So this year, we'll see technology that facilitates that integration and convergence as well as facilitates and enables online marketing such as Web analytics, search engine marketing, and other types of customer communication technology for using the Internet as a channel. This will be pretty exciting for the market in 2006.
I believe we made pretty sound high-level strategic decisions in 2005. If the question is about mistakes we made, there were plenty! I am fortunate, however, that Unica has a strong team and balanced culture that fosters intellectual honesty. We have time and time again been able to make the appropriate adjustments to improve and correct course when mistakes are realized. We anticipate continuous change and expect to make mistakes. If we can maintain our ability to admit when we are wrong, our success will continue in 2006 – of this I am sure!
Three Highpoints Last Year
Clearly, completing the IPO journey and becoming a public company was a huge milestone for Unica. I am especially proud that we were able to complete this extremely rigorous process, maintain our focus on customer success and deliver another year of solid profitability and revenue growth, our fourth consecutive year in a row.
Another was when we won the CRM Magazine Market Leader Award for Marketing Automation for the second year in a row. This particular award is very meaningful to us since winners are selected based on a combination of year-over-year revenue growth, analyst ratings for customer satisfaction, depth of functionality and company direction. This year we surpassed all other competitors in each of the three key reputation categories and our year-over-year scores increased in both the customer satisfaction and depth of functionality categories.
Another proud moment was when we were named to the Deloitte Technology Fast 50 New England for the sixth consecutive year. These rankings track the 50 fastest growing technology companies in the area by Deloitte & Touche and we are the only company to achieve this six-peat status. We also made the national Deloitte Technology Fast 500 ranking for the sixth time in a row.
Unica's IPO process
In terms of other learnings from the past year, the length of the IPO process was another of them.. We are in a stage where the SEC is still refining some of their changing policies and regulations on how they manage the process of an IPO filing. For us, the IPO process – from the start with banker selection to org meetings to filing the S1 to the actual IPO – took more than a year. For a company with the track record of Unica, I wouldn't have expected it to last that long. Fortunately, the end result was positive.
Yuchun Lee is responsible for Unica's overall strategic direction, and day-to-day business operations. He co-founded the company in 1992 to meet the technology needs and challenges specific to marketers. Prior to joining Unica, Yuchun held senior-level positions with Digital Equipment Corporation and M.I.T.'s Lincoln and Media Labs. He holds both Bachelor and Master of Science degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from M.I.T. and a Master of Business Administration degree from Babson College. For article feedback, contact Yuchun at ylee@unica.com
 
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